Four Times Duke or Nathan Got Caught in the Crossfire (& One Time)
by Roseveare
Summary: Audrey Parker is immune to the Troubles. Less so the two guys standing beside her...


Title: Four Times Duke or Nathan Got Caught in the Crossfire (& One Time They Didn't)  
>Author: roseveare<br>Written for Lyrstzha in Yuletide 2014  
>Rating: mild Rmature  
>Pairing: Duke CrockerAudrey Parker/Nathan Wuornos  
>Length: 7301<br>Summary: Audrey Parker is immune to the Troubles. Less so the two guys standing beside her...

* * *

><p><strong>Four Times Duke or Nathan Got Caught in the Crossfire (&amp; One Time They Didn't)<strong>

**1. **

"Nathan... Nathan, whatever you do, don't move!" Duke shouted the words up the newly humongous proportions of Nathan with no small amount of panic, because Nathan's oversized face was a picture of confusion, his feet were almost the size of a car, and Duke wasn't sure he'd quite grasped the situation yet. The world probably looked skewed and difficult to recognise from his new perspective.

The asshole movie enthusiast, Kevin Dalley, was stammering like an idiot and staring between Audrey and giant Nathan with something close to affront. He protested feebly, "But... but I was going for _Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman_."

"Well, you got _Attack of the Fifty Foot Numb-Assed Cop_!" Duke snapped.

Audrey cupped her hands and shouted up to Nathan, "Just stay where you are! Nathan! Don't move your feet!"

Nathan moved his feet as he shifted his balance and leaned down toward Audrey. It struck Duke that maybe he couldn't actually hear them well from his lofty height. Nathan whipped his head side-to-side, blinking in alarm. "Audrey, is that you? What's...?" His voice was as big as the rest of him and its trembling caused cars and windows to rattle. "What's happening to me?"

"Nathan, _don't_..." Audrey started.

Nathan was at least trying to be careful where he moved his body, but he'd already brushed a swath of tiles from a nearby roof without noticing, and to Duke's mind, this was definitely not a transformation you wanted to happen to the guy who couldn't feel what random damage he caused in his wake.

"Nathan, stay still!" Audrey tried again, yelling at the top of her voice.

He focused in on her at last and relief swept his expression, magnified a hundredfold by the size of his face. Audrey gave a little squeak of startled dismay as his giant hand reached in and picked her up.

Kevin Dalley's eyes gleamed with renewed interest. "I can call it as King Kong instead," he said to Duke, whose protest had choked even as he realised the utter futility of reaching to grab for Audrey's hand or try to hold Nathan off in any way.

Duke wondered seriously if punching Dalley's lights out would stop this Trouble in its tracks or just compound the problem. He poked a finger in the idiot movie buff's face. "Movies are fun. Fucking with people to use your Trouble to bring movies to life is _not fun_."

He glanced worriedly up at giant!Nathan, but perhaps nabbing Audrey was the best thing he could have done after all. He was holding her up, now, level with his face, and she flailed her arms animatedly, the message of _Nathan, you ass_ coming across loud and clear even from below. As Duke watched, Nathan's expression turned chastened and his body slowly straightened up. His face turned down to watch his feet carefully, and after a moment he was standing stiffly and very still in the centre of the street, leaving only that damaged roof and a few scuffed car paint jobs to show for his unintentional 'rampage'. His downturned face fixed unhappily on Duke before he lifted his head again.

A bunch of children across the street were pointing excitedly, while the neighbours still outside took advantage of the lull to break their paralysis and run inside their houses and locked their doors.

Audrey clambered to sit on the palm of Nathan's raised hand and nodded approvingly, looking a lot less like a distressed victim.

Kevin Dalley was pouting.

"Put him _back_," Duke said.

"I didn't mean to change him in the first place!" the guy whined, like that was the only thing that was wrong here.

Duke eyed fifty foot Nathan and allowed that Audrey in the same role would have had a more... well, a certain aesthetic... call that _fetish_... value. "Man, I don't even understand the giant woman thing," he sighed. But there was a note to his sigh that even he could hear. He shook his head. Then he caught himself. "It's wrong," he said sternly to Kevin. "Bad and wrong. Fix Nathan before he sneezes and flattens the lighthouse again."

"I can't," Kevin moaned. "But, but they always seem to wear off after about twelve hours anyway?"

The giant ants had disappeared overnight, and the unfortunate guy who'd got the _Alien_ face-sucker had thankfully reverted to normal before it got to the bursting-out-through-the-abdomen stage, Duke reflected.

"You tell me you're not going to do this again and I won't tell Nathan to sit on your house until he returns to normal size," Duke declared in annoyed ultimatum.

Kevin Dalley blanched. Duke could see the rooms festooned with memorabilia through the open door and nearby window, and Dalley had been bragging earlier about how he'd turned his living room into his own private movie theatre. It was enough to give Duke a pretty good idea where to hit him so it hurt.

"I told you I'd fix it if I could!" he wailed. "Who the hell wants a _giant cop_, anyway?!"

* * *

><p>Sunset found them perched on one of the hillsides outside Haven. Nathan's absurdly big form was hunched up, knees bent down the hill, hands rested on the grass either side of him, bowing the ground. Audrey lazed against his shoulder. Duke sprawled out over his hip. It was warm there, and surprisingly comfortable, considering Nathan was a bag of bony angles. Duke reflected with entertainment that Nathan's giant ass-print was going to become a permanent landmark.<p>

"So it bounced," Nathan said glumly. "The Trouble _bounced_."

"I'm really sorry," Audrey said. "I guess you were just... standing next to me."

"Why couldn't it bounce onto _Duke_?"

"Thanks." Duke slapped Nathan's hip bone a few times. "You're a pal."

"At least we managed to get you out of town without causing too much damage," Audrey said.

Nathan snorted and a few trees further down the slope rocked wildly for a moment in the brief resulting gale. "Wonder what Vince and Dave will come up with to convince everyone they were hallucinating _this_?"

"They took photos," Audrey said. "I saw them. Hey, do you think they write up the articles they can't print sometimes, anyway, just because? I bet they do. I bet there's a file somewhere with all these copies of the 'real', unseen _Haven Herald_."

"If I were them, I would," Duke admitted. "'Fifty Foot Police Chief Flattens East Side of Town'. Yeah..." He found himself grinning and tried to tone it down before Nathan noticed... "Ow!" Getting flicked in the ear by a giant finger wasn't the greatest. "Nathan, you fifty foot _bastard-_"

"Shush," Audrey said.

Nathan shifted to look at his watch, joggling both of them in place.

"Oops," said Audrey, as she slid down awkwardly, clinging to Nathan's jacket in a controlled fall. She joined Duke on the opposite hip.

"It's been eight hours," Nathan said, sounding excessively depressed. "Does that mean I have to sit here another four? It's going to be past midnight."

"Never mind," Audrey reached inside his shirt and patted his midriff, making his oversized body quiver. "We'll keep you company."

"You're pretty cosy," Duke said.

"I'm not a mattress..." Nathan started testily.

"No, but maybe we can snuggle down and think of something to keep ourselves occupied?" Audrey added, thoroughly forestalling the argument with a very naughty smirk.

* * *

><p><strong>2.<strong>

According to the staff of Duke's bar and restaurant, it had taken half an hour to coax him down from flapping around the ceiling of the _Grey Gull_ before they'd thought to call Nathan and Audrey. The coaxing had only finally been achieved by Tracey with the aid of the day's special - Prawn and Salmon filo parcels.

"He just _changed_," Tracey said, wringing her hands. "No warning, no-one around... It's just as well it _is_ quiet this morning!"

Duke's staff had been exposed to enough Troubles by now that they took them in their stride far too well, Nathan rather thought. He wrestled with the seagull under his arm and said, as Audrey held open the door for them to leave, "Duke makes one _ugly_ bird."

The gull took a gouge out of his arm in reprisal. Nathan stretched his face into his best nasty grin and told it, "Can't feel that. Asshole."

"Just keep a tight hold of him," Audrey said. "It's not going to be funny if he flies off and gets lost among the thousand other sea birds flocking around Haven and we can never, ever get him _turned back_."

"Or if he turns back automatically while he's a hundred feet in the air," Nathan agreed, wincing.

The gull might have understood that, because it gave a squawk of alarm and stopped struggling quite so much.

Audrey pulled a face. "Duke?" she said, with some trepidation as she stared intently at the bird, moving her face closer "Duke, can you hear me? Do you understand what I'm saying? ...Oh my God, I feel ridiculous."

"The bird doesn't understand," Nathan said. "And don't put your nose that close, he's already bitten me."

The gull gave a raucous squawk. "I think he's saying that he likes _me_," Audrey said.

"Figures." Nathan glared at Duke-the-gull. "I don't like you, either."

Audrey gave a sing-song little hum and chimed, "That's not what you were saying this morning."

"He wasn't just another of Haven's _flying rat_ population this morning."

"Just the average seafaring variety, eh?" Audrey grinned at him. The bird in Nathan's arms struggled and made more noise, as if protesting the levity.

"Quiet up," Nathan growled. "We're going to fix this." And now he was talking to the dumb bird, too. He sighed.

"Maybe we can... wrap it up in these clothes," Audrey suggested, wincing as Nathan's arm took another gouge, and holding up the pile of discarded clothing Tracey had handed over. She helped bundle the seagull up in Duke's trousers. "Oh, look, he didn't wear underwear again this morning." The barrier made it a lot easier to control the flapping wings and the talons, but they could do little about the beak, and that was making a definite bee-line for Nathan's flesh. "Okay, I don't know how much this gull is still Duke, but I'd say he _definitely_ remembers his relationship with you."

Nathan wasn't remotely convinced there was much of a conscious, reasoning Duke Crocker left in there, whatever Audrey said. Although the fact he'd crapped all over the shoulder of Nathan's jacket could, indeed, be taken either way. "At least he's not a tiger."

"No," Audrey said grimly. "Poor Cathy Devon." They'd had animal control trying to contain her all morning. "Okay, so... animal Trouble. Clearly. I'm thinking our starting place has got to be a zoo, or pet shop... Someone who works with animals."

"School project?" Nathan suggested, trying to control the struggling bundle of Duke-the-seagull as they headed towards the Bronco. "Kids love animals."

"There's obviously specific associations involved in how this Trouble works," Audrey mulled. "Duke runs the _Grey Gull_, Cathy had that terrible tiger-skin rug..." She shuddered.

"She showed that monstrosity off to half the town," Nathan said.

"Yeah. But I guess there's nothing to say the Troubled person has to know about the association, right? Maybe they just trigger the transformation, they don't choose it. We don't know any link between Dan Wright and donkeys, so at least that one isn't very public... Or perhaps the Troubled person knows Wright well."

"No-one knows Wright well," Nathan countered. "He greets the mailman with a shotgun. And Haven doesn't really have a zoo, except the little petting zoo attached to Seth Barrow's farm."

Duke-the-seagull squawked and almost broke free from Nathan's arms. "_Cage_," Nathan declared with difficulty - and finality. "We're going to the pet shop first. Then we can leave _this_ back in my office."

Audrey eyed the bird and the new gouges in Nathan's arm. "Check. He definitely has it in for you."

Nathan clutched the bird tighter as it made a deep, baleful sound of hate that it was hard to believe had come from such a relatively small creature. He said tightly, "You're going to have to drive."

* * *

><p>"Humiliating," Duke declared later, standing and gesticulating in naked agitation, after they'd untangled him from the cramped remnant of the cage - which, in their defense, had been a large, <em>roomy<em> cage. "That was _humiliating_. You both suck. So much."

Nathan rolled his eyes. "You bit me." He irritably showed off the series of band aids down his arm. "You bit me a _lot_ for 'just trying to get your attention'. They made me have shots."

"He did have shots," Audrey grinned, and she obviously found it all too amusing. Which she could, Nathan thought sourly, because she was safe in the confidence that it wouldn't ever happen to her. "You wouldn't think he couldn't feel pain, he made such a fuss. You'd have enjoyed it."

"Just one more thing I missed because I was stuck in a cage in your office at the time, just for _trying to tell you_ the answer to the whole problem-" Duke was building up to a fairly formidable rant as he jabbed his finger toward Nathan's patched-up arm.

"You _bit_ me," Nathan interrupted, stolidly. "Shots."

"You didn't freakin' need any shots because I was never a real seagull to have any real seagull diseases!" Duke growled.

"Exactly," Nathan growled back with belligerence. "That's _exactly_ what I kept telling them."

"Guys, now you're arguing over agreeing with each other," Audrey pointed out, inserting her hands between them to pry them apart. "All right, it's been a really long day with no small amount of discomfort to either of you - though probably the cage does win out, there - and I think it's time to go home." She thrust a bundle at Duke. "Clothes."

"Discomfort? He _can't feel_." Duke scoffed, his voice rising to a high pitch. "And if you'd just _looked at_ what I was trying to tell you- I mean, shit, how would you have tried to communicate if you were a, a, a _prisoner_ and only had a _beak?_!"

Nathan peeled back the dressings on his arm and squinted at the gouges there again. From a certain angle, they almost did look like the word 'SETH'.

"It's obvious," Duke said dangerously. "And that, I'll have you know, is remarkable penmanship. Beakmanship. Given what I was working with. Seth came to see me first thing this morning after kitchen scraps for feed. I knew it had to be him."

"It's really not obvious," Audrey countered. "And how did you think that biting Nathan was a good way to win us over? All jokes aside, you weren't exactly acting like you were still you in there."

"I had _bird-brain_. It seemed - at the time, it - Okay, _Held prisoner by your supposed friends and lovers_," Duke said, diving for melodrama and really laying it on. "Stuffed in a _cage_. Manhandled. Maltreated."

"We didn't know," Audrey sighed. "Duke, please, just get dressed and we'll go home and make it up to you."

Nathan covered his gouged arm again. Frowning, he pointed silently at the blobs where whitish-grey matter had stained his jacket despite all attempts to wipe it clean.

Duke glared. "Birds are incontinent. It's not my fault. You, on the other hand, stuck me in a cage all day. I couldn't even communicate. You could even call it a traumatising experience."

"Come on, guys, let's just go _home_," Audrey groaned, and Duke made a resistant noise.

Nathan huffed peevishly. Once Duke got like this it could be never-ending. Around them, most of the other occupants of the police station had cleared up and gone, and it was getting very late.

"All right," Nathan said, and thrust his handcuffs into Duke's hands with an angry clink. "We're going home to bed. Where you can tie me up, gag me, go to town. Just whatever will shut you the hell up about this, okay?"

Duke swallowed, stopped, and his eyes took on a canny gleam. "Seriously?" He tightened his fist around the cuffs' rings and reached down and started to haul his pants on with a new fervour.

Audrey patted Nathan on the shoulder and herded him ahead of her toward the door. "Something tells me you might regret that one, the mood he's in..."

Duke followed behind them, still only half wearing his shirt, jangling the handcuffs and walking with rather too much spring in his step.

* * *

><p><strong>3.<strong>

"I don't want to hear _anything_ about 'ugly birds' from your lips this time, Nathan," Duke said fiercely. "Not one word, alright?"

Nathan tried to keep the smirk from his lips but judging from the reflection of Duke's ire, failed.

"You don't look ugly," Audrey said, walking briskly to catch up to them. "Although you sure as hell look weird in those clothes, and I kind of wonder where the beard went."

"His hair's a bit longer," Nathan observed, squinting and craning back to study the rear of Duke's head.

"Right," Duke snapped. "Conservation of whatever. I'd rather know where my _dick_ went. No. I'd rather have it _back_."

Audrey snickered. "Suck it up," she said pitilessly. "We _know_ this one's harmless, and it wears off in a matter of a day or so. You'll just have to be... Duke-ette... for a while. Meanwhile, the Trouble causing people to murder their loved ones in their sleep? Is _much_ more important right now."

Nathan gave Duke a glance containing rather more sympathy.

Not that it earned him any points. "This is _so_ not fair," Duke complained. "Especially when it's _Nathan's turn_."

"It is not," Nathan said.

"Since when did it start being about 'turns'?" Audrey asked. "And since when did either of you get the illusion that you wear the pants in this relationship anyway?" She said it with fond mockery. But her grin was evil. Nathan, a bit taken aback, opened his mouth to protest.

"Don't even," Duke hissed, leaning close to his ear. "You don't have a leg to stand on."

"Well," Nathan chewed the words slowly, narrowing his eyes, "you ladies do have me outnumbered at the moment."

"Bitch."

Nathan snorted. Audrey, who'd pulled in front on her charge for the car, stopped to frown very darkly back at them.

They silenced and trotted obediently at her heels to Nathan's Ford Bronco.

* * *

><p>The murderous Trouble turned out to belong to a man who'd been entertaining secret fantasies of killing his wife for the last sixteen years, and as horrible as that <em>sounded<em>, so far as Nathan could figure, those thoughts had he not been Troubled would have stayed entirely in his head: he'd never done it, never seriously planned it, never _would have_ done it. And he was just as appalled by the consequences as everyone else.

The three of them sat in his kitchen watching through the window as Marvin Benton's controlling, angry wife flounced her most prized possessions out of the house and loaded them into the car while Marvin Benton stood helplessly by, with his arms held straight by his sides. His fingers twitched. Occasionally, sporadically, his face cracked out the most blissful of unintentional smiles.

"I don't think we need to worry about this Trouble striking again," Nathan said.

"No," Audrey agreed soberly. "I guess figuring out who to charge and with what is going to be a really fun exercise, though."

"I have breasts," announced Duke, who had a hand inside his shirt. "And they're kind of awesome."

Audrey and Nathan looked at him, then away again.

"What this Trouble did is really horrible," Duke added, in a fast attempt to save himself.

"We're going to need to wring another diminished responsibility story of some kind from the Teagues," Nathan said.

Audrey made a noise of unease. She was staring out of the window at the aggressive Mrs. Benton, who was yelling at her intimidated husband in tearful melodrama. She'd cooked and cleaned for him for twenty years, true enough, but she'd also regulated his life, right down to the clothes he wore, his television viewing, his daily schedule down to the hour (literally: it was pinned on the fridge and Nathan had read it, gawping) and which friends he could see.

"When I said I wear the pants in this relationship," Audrey said carefully, "I mean, your balls are mine, and that is beyond debate, but that's, you know. I'm not like _that_."

Duke and Nathan shook their heads dutifully and made positive noises.

"No. Well," Duke backtracked, and pointed at Nathan. "To him you're like that. But _he_ likes it. Hey-" He flung up his palms to protect himself from the force of their glares. "Peace! I just speak the truth as I see it."

Audrey turned her scowl back to the window. "Get your hands out of your shirt," she said crisply, while Mrs. Benton's car roared about as fiercely as its owner, pulling away. "Benton's coming back."

Duke squinted out of the window. "You might want to rethink your who-to-blame plan. He looks _really happy_ for a man who just found out that he accidentally killed three people."

* * *

><p>Duke being a woman was wrong and weird but Nathan had to admit that it was a concept he'd grown more at-ease with throughout the day, as he-she reaffirmed all the little gestures and touches that formed part of his-her essential <em>Duke<em>-ness as still being just as much there as before.

And Duke as a woman, sprawled across Nathan's back seat as he drove them all back to the _Cape Rouge_, was starting to look disturbingly... alluring. Which was _not _something Nathan associated with Duke. Not that Duke wasn't attractive to him, but, well, it was an attraction that worked in different ways. It was about a masculine physicality, not smooth skin and shapely lips, and the cheeky fall of hair over the wicked gleam of a long-lashed eye. The smooth skin was the oddest. But the shape of that chin on a woman was also kind of odd, because the transformation had only softened it a little. Still, it gave the resulting face - which was still undeniably Duke's - a sort of forceful feminine character.

And there were lines of a body under those baggy clothes that was also different. Still tall and well-muscled and defined, though.

Nathan would have to admit that he was experiencing... curiosity. Or perhaps more accurately the urge to dive in and go exploring.

Audrey kept exchanging him furtive glances and peering at Duke in the mirror, and she was developing a certain shiftiness in her expression.

They were nearly pulling up at the marina by the time she finally burst out, "Maybe we should... talk... about what we're going to do tonight. Because Duke is... well, not himself-" Duke snorted laughter. "And some of us, not the least Duke, might not be completely comfortable with doing all the things tonight that we would... usually... do."

She choked a bit on that, but Nathan felt it was very gallant.

"You're so full of shit," Duke said. "How about you, Nathan?"

"What you're comfortable with," Nathan managed to bite off, and not send the car on a nose-dive into the sea by overshooting the last turn.

"Right," Duke drawled with sarcasm, angling a knee sluttishly upward and flicking his hair, curling his head back to show off his long, smooth neck. "See, I've been thinking. Long and hard. About this. _All day_... And I've come to the conclusion that, well, if I'm set to stay like this at least until the morning, then at the _very least_ I plan to fuck Nathan tonight."

Nathan slewed the Bronco to a halt with a screech while Audrey made a gleeful sound that choked off into whooping, laboured giggles.

"What?" Duke asked. "Chance to see how the other half lives. Who's not going to go there?"

"Are you trying to kill us?" Nathan's voice came out low and hoarse, as he stared at Duke over the back of his seat.

"Uh, not yet?" Duke's face twisted in vague offence. "But I'm pretty sure I can get there before the evening's over."

* * *

><p><strong>4.<strong>

"This sucks," Duke said to Nathan, who wasn't even listening, so far as he knew. "Oh my God, this _sucks_." He reached up and touched Nathan's face, which didn't move or react in response, not that it would have anyway. _Stiff_ was a word Duke had frequently slung Nathan's way for a variety of derogatory purposes, but he'd never looked as stiff as he did now.

Duke rapped his knuckles against Nathan's chin and got a dull, stony _bomp_ noise.

"Tell me they're still alive in there," Duke said, seized suddenly by panic. Because they'd had a ton of Troubles gone awry inflicted upon them in the course of helping Audrey and they'd come back from them, one way or another, but something about seeing Nathan so frozen and grey seemed so very _final_.

"We don't know," Audrey said thickly. "No-one's recovered yet." She picked up a cracked hand-mirror that lay inexplicably on the floor of the bank, stared at it a moment, then hurled it back down again to smash well-and-truly into pieces. "He came with me. He _always_ comes with me. 'Like Medusa', he said. 'I can use a mirror'."

Duke winced. "Didn't work?"

Audrey's glare was hollow-eyed.

It had been a Troubled bank robbery. The kid with the stony gaze had decided that the best use for his new-found powers was larceny, headed into the bank, demanded cash, and taken off his sunglasses when the police showed up to the teller's alarm. He'd hit both of Haven's banks within two hours of each other, and Audrey had explained to Duke on the phone - before she'd quite got around to explaining that Nathan was a freakin' _statue_ - how she and Nathan, knowing what had happened to the civilians and HPD officers at the first bank, had taken the second call-out, forewarned and armed with their plan.

"And the kid still got away in the confusion," Audrey said angrily.

Duke kind of read that as, _While I was freaking out about Nathan_.

Their amateur bank robber had at least picked a quiet hour to minimise casualties. One bank teller here - the other had hid in the back - and two tellers and two customers plus the responding officers at the other place, if Duke remembered correctly from Nathan's incredulous phone call an hour earlier; the last time he'd heard Nathan's voice.

_Won't be the last_, he told himself firmly, gripping his hand around the arm of the Nathan-statue, who stood with one hand raised holding his Glock at a half-twisted angle and the other just raised, absent the fallen hand-mirror, sort-of-mostly facing toward the door.

"So, what am I here for?" Duke asked, flailing a bit inside. "Seeing as how I'm no more invulnerable to this than he was and mirrors don't work?"

"I thought you could... stay with him," Audrey said, floundering for words. "Because I think someone should and I can't. Because I need to go after the kid. I don't want to leave him, but if I know _you're_ here, I'll be able to, and I can focus." Her eyes implored him not to push. Duke wasn't really used to looks of that kind of desperation from her.

"Of course," he said quickly. He frowned and gestured. "What about the teller?"

"He's... we have to try and cover this up unless there's no other option," Audrey said. "I can't fetch anyone to watch over him, Duke."

"No, I mean he's _watching us_."

Her eyebrows crunched in disapproval and she pulled a face. "Turn him toward the wall, then. Okay, I need to _go_."

Duke watched her hop the police tape, the door slamming after her. He groaned and held his head with both hands. Then he went to the bank teller, who was too heavy to turn around, but there was a blind that drew down over the window to close his position, and Duke drew it down, then returned to Nathan.

He tapped his fist on Nathan's forehead in a brief rhythm to punctuate his words: "Next time, _do not _gamble your life on _mythology_."

Nathan's eyes were a stony blank but nevertheless seemed to exude stubbornness. Something that gave Duke hope that he was conscious and aware inside there - which meant at least _alive_, but was somehow so much more horrible than him just sleeping the experience through.

Though it also made Duke feel a bit less insane about the fact he'd just been asked to stay here and keep Nathan company in this state, and a bit better for Audrey's sanity, too.

Being a seagull in a cage for a day had not been a good experience, but at least he'd been able to move. Duke wondered if Nathan's Trouble would be a help, on that score. Whether not being able to _feel _restlessness or physical paralysis would be easier.

"Hey," Duke said, peering into Nathan's face. "If you missed that part, Audrey's gone to get the kid and fix this."

So began one of the stranger afternoons of Duke's experience. He exchanged a few phone calls with Audrey about progress (none yet), with Stan about any changes over at the other bank where he'd been put on guard duty of the other statues (no changes). Mostly he talked to Nathan, regaling him with tales of their childhood which he already knew, with tales of Duke's sexual exploits in the overseas port bars of his early twenties, with tales of Buddhist monks and remote mountains, of mercenary-pirates and even a shipload of Bermuda Triangle investigators - things he'd never told _anyone_.

By the time he'd covered all that, his voice was cracking and so he tried to take the opportunity, since Nathan couldn't for once complain about it, to teach Nathan how to dance. Unfortunately, he could only rock Nathan in a half-dozen stumbling steps before it became alarmingly clear that he was more likely to topple them and break something important on either one of them, and he was forced to give up the idea. He sighed. "You really weigh some as a statue."

Nathan's eyelid twitched.

Duke yelped and grabbed his shoulders, and stared into his eyes for long enough to see him do it again, then stared some more. He did notice that the skin seemed to have recovered just a little blush of colour around Nathan's eyes and nose. "Oh, thank God," he groaned, falling forward into Nathan's stone chest and clinging to him hard. "Ow."

Then he grabbed his phone and called up Stan. "-No, they're coming _out_ of it," he said, insistently, at the cop's denial. "Look closely. Really, really closely... Like eyelash-twitch level closeness, okay?" But Stan insisted that the others were still as stony as ever, and that made no sense, because _they'd_ been changed before Nathan had. "All right, give me a moment to check this," Duke said, and shut the phone off.

Half afraid he'd imagined it, he checked Nathan again - still blinking, sort of, irises even a bit darker and more liquid, more responsive and more human, now - then he checked the guy behind the counter. And found zip, nada, nothing.

"-Huh," said Duke, and rang Audrey.

She said, "Not now," and cut off the call before he could get any words out.

"All right..." Duke said slowly. He walked back to Nathan and rested a hand on his shoulder while he called Stan back. "You need..." He cleared his throat awkwardly. "You have to talk to them. Or get people they know to come in and talk to them, maybe. I'm pretty sure that's what works."

And, great... in saying that, he'd just admitted that he'd spent the last four hours doing nothing but talking his heart out to a statue.

* * *

><p>Nathan came out of it enough within the next hour to speak again, the skin of his face greyed and frosty and his body still mostly immobile below shoulder level. He used his renewed ability to speak to insist that Duke try to bring the bank teller out of the Trouble, too. "Or move him over here, so that I can talk to him."<p>

"You're kidding, right? That guy's got to be over three hundred pounds as flesh and I have no idea what that translates into as stone, but I can't shift it."

"Why don't you _dance_ me over to him, then?" Nathan snapped, scowling, which pretty conclusively revealed he'd been aware of everything done and said by Duke the whole way through. Duke experienced a moment of panic and fast re-evaluation of some of the things he maybe shouldn't have said.

"I preferred you when you couldn't speak," he grumped, and then inched Nathan across the floor by bracing his body behind him, his feet behind Nathan's feet, in a fashion that probably would've looked rather lewd if anyone had been watching. "I think I got wood," he gasped into Nathan's ear, heart thudding with exertion as he finally drew them to a halt.

"Sorry," Nathan said snidely, flicking his eyes to each of his locked-out arms in turn. "Can't help."

They both reached a simultaneous realisation and eyed the blind behind which the teller, who Nathan had called Sal Whitman, could probably quite clearly hear them.

"_Shit_," Duke mouthed and then held his finger in front of his lips. Nathan nodded back very minimally. Duke flipped open the blind.

It almost went without saying that Nathan trying to talk to anyone for several hours straight was a lost cause, and of course Duke ended up carrying the bulk of it - again. Audrey phoned at the point he'd retreated into the staff area of the bank to raid the coffee and sandwich supplies for his hoarse throat and grumbling belly, and Nathan, whose upper half was kind of mobile but nowhere near dextrous enough yet to manipulate a cellphone, yelled him impatiently back. "_Phone_, damn it!"

"Good news," Audrey said breathlessly as Duke grabbed up the phone. "I've got the kid, and he says-"

"Good news," Duke countered, interrupting. "He's fine. You want to say hello?" He lifted the phone to Nathan's ear.

"Audrey, I'm fine," Nathan said obediently. There was a pause and his face shifted... and he admitted cautiously, "I still can't really move my legs. But it's working. And I think Sal twitched." He grimaced at something Audrey said in reply to that. "No, I'm not completely sure. Stan says I'm the only one who's come out of it so far."

His face blanked a bit, then, almost like it had switched back to stone again, and after a moment Duke took the phone back.

"I'm coming over there," Audrey said. "And we'll need to get a friend or relative of Sal's. Perhaps we can bring Jolene back." Jolene was the co-worker who'd been traumatised by witnessing the robbery. "Since she already knows about... all this." She cut off the call.

Duke discovered that Nathan had gone mysteriously tight-lipped, and he no longer insisted on talking to Sal as they waited for Audrey, instead lurching on his still-mostly-immobile legs with Duke's help over to the wall so he could lean there to wait it out.

"Some day you're going to _tell me_ what she said," Duke grumbled to the recovering, silent Nathan.

* * *

><p>He didn't have to wait long. Audrey told him later that night, in bed.<p>

"Haven't you figured it out yet, Duke? It was _love_, the connection that could bring the victims back to life..." A low growl rose from the cold and still slightly stony lump under the covers next to them. "...Stop being such a _pain_ about it, Nathan."

* * *

><p><strong>5.<strong>

"Oh my God, you guys, I hate you," Audrey said. "And I'm really, really sorry." She lifted her head from the sidewalk slowly, as it reeled in flat circles. Everything still felt a bit funny. Nathan was blinking at her with concerned confusion. Duke's mouth was quirking in something that obviously didn't quite dare to be a smile while she was looking.

"As long as you're all right," Nathan said, extending a hand to help her up. She made it as far as her knees. His arms curled around her waist and shoulders, but stuck to providing a supportive hold, in the public setting, rather than an outright embrace.

"Oh, I'm _fine_," she said, hearing the almost manic pitch in her own voice at the ridicule of it all. "I just feel like a complete idiot... Charging in like that... forgetting all about the little things like _not being immune to Troubles anymore_."

"Well," said Duke, and a sort of frustrated uncertainty seemed to chase away the smile skirting the edge of his lips, "I'm sure there are worse Troubles to run headlong into than the being-whammied-into-a-two-dimensional-cutout thing."

Audrey narrowed her eyes at him, not sure quite what he was trying to say, and he raised his hands in mock surrender.

She looked around as Nathan slowly guided her the rest of the way to her feet, and noted the state of the other victims, who were also starting to... to _peel_ themselves off the ground. Audrey shuddered as she watched one of them actually re-inflate before her very eyes, returning into a fully living, breathing human form from something that was emphatically... not. "I... was like that?"

It was a strange, alarming thought. She had never needed to _worry_ about it before. Other things, sure.

Audrey looked at Duke and Nathan, nodding at her in grave concern or in Duke's case a passable approximation of it, and she thought... thought about how those around her had _always_ had to contend with the idea that the Troubles they dealt with on a day-to-day basis might also strike them. "Okay," she groaned, swaying as she made herself let go of Nathan and stand on her own two feet. "How come you two guys avoided getting whammied, anyway?"

Nathan's features twisted into that considered-serious-pouty-face he did so well and he said gruffly, "Practice."

"Yeah," Duke echoed, with a bit more mirth resurfacing. "Practice. That and not charging straight at the Troubled person. Nathan's less good at that one, though."

"It's... well, it's really not fun, is it?" Audrey asked, dragging her hand through her hair - 2D had flattened all the life out of it - and giving a shaky laugh. Her head reeled, trying to get to grips with three planes of existence again.

"On the other hand," Duke said, "you're now finally a full member of the club. Congratulations."

"...Really? Thank you, I think." Looking around, all the people who had been two-dimensional seemed to be real again, and it didn't look as though there were any casualties, any permanent harm done. She sighed to herself a bit, because she was _supposed _to be good at this, and she was supposed to be solving these Troubles, but then again, at least she could put it down to a learning experience and a new perspective on the world. One apparently much-needed. "What happened to the Troubled guy with the drawing book?"

Nathan looked uncomfortable.

"You talked him down?" Audrey was about to launch off on how he shouldn't feel guilty about that; how it was _great_ if he could do that in her place, especially now she was no longer immune... when she had a sinking feeling that that wasn't it at all. "No. You _didn't_ shoot him." She looked in alarm at Duke for confirmation.

"He _scared the pants _off him," Duke said, grin finally breaking out from ear to ear as he dispelled her fears.

"Duke helped," Nathan said curtly. "He'd. He. You were on the _ground_. _Flat_."

And Nathan really had never seen that before, Audrey thought. He'd seen her become whole other people - up to and including _evil_ other people - and seen her disappear into mystical dimension travelling Barns, but he'd not seen her... be vulnerable to all the crazy, illogical, reality-distorting, uncomfortable and just plain _humiliating_ crap that Nathan, and Duke, and everyone else around her contended with being acutely vulnerable to every day.

"Maybe I don't need this story," Audrey said, a bit wryly. "Or at least not right now." Right now, she needed a coffee, or perhaps something stronger, and she needed her guys. Definitely those. She was focusing hard on standing up on her own in public, but she at least clung to them with her eyes and tried to let them know how much they were needed.

"I... uh, I have to get back to keep watch over the evil version," Duke said uncertainly, pointing over his shoulder.

"Dwight can arrange someone else to watch Mara, just for one night," Nathan said, forcefully.

"You know how many things there are on my boat that I don't want Dwight to-?" Duke stopped. "Wait. You're a cop... and you're also a cop. Never mind."

"We've both been on your boat plenty," Audrey grinned. "And whatever you're still hiding, we've never found it." So either it was _really_ well hidden or - the theory she leaned toward ever more strongly - old and irrelevant in the face of Duke's new, changed spots.

"I'm not sleeping with Dwight, and therefore can't bribe him with sexual favours or attempt blackmail using candid amateur photography," Duke said. "That makes him scarier."

Nathan snorted. "Call Dwight. We're all going back to mine."

"I'll call Dwight," said Audrey, waving them both on ahead. She had a feeling that, considering the state of Duke and Nathan's favour with the big Police Chief at the moment, she'd be able to make more headway than either of them.

As she raised the phone to her ear, they trundled side by side ahead of her... and she heard them start muttering. She paused and cut the call before it could ring through, and listened instead.

"A cut-out," said Duke. "Not an animal, or a whole other gender. There wasn't even any acute embarrassment or grinding humiliation."

"Well, there was some degree of professional..." Nathan started warily, then did a double-take and shot Duke a narrow look. "Are you _serious_? She was _flat_. She couldn't have lived like that, if we hadn't managed to fix-"

"It didn't even last longer than about three minutes!" Duke hissed. "And she wasn't conscious. I don't think."

"Duke, are you _wishing_ those things on her?" Nathan's voice gathered a dangerous edge.

"...No." Duke glanced guiltily backward and Audrey was careful to press the phone to her ear and look deeply occupied. "I am definitely, definitely not wishing it. I am only saying that..."

"What?"

Duke tossed his hands in the air. "Never mind." He shook his head, apparently re-evaluating, and came back fiercely. "No. No, _wait_. Compared with everything that's happened to _us_ over the last few years..."

"She's had her whole identity stripped away, Duke. _Twice_. If that's the price of immunity, _I_ wouldn't want it."

Audrey grinned as she watched Duke flail.

"...But no," Nathan added, his voice sinking into a very quiet, guilty grumble. "Being made into a cardboard cut-out of yourself for all of three minutes..."

He left that hanging, until Duke chimed in a quick, quiet, "pshaw", and with a last guilty look back - Audrey clutched the phone and smiled wider and more innocently, fixing her gaze determinedly away from them - the two men continued perfectly in step, heads nodding together in unison.

Audrey laughed quite a lot. But she kept the phone to her ear, and when Duke and Nathan looked fearfully back again, left them to believe that Dwight had said something out-of-character and hilarious.

Immunity wasn't everything. Duke and Nathan had survived two years of this.

She could do it, too.

END


End file.
